Dr Thomas Bird

Biography

Dr Bird is an Honorary Consultant Hepatologist based in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. He also runs a basic research group in the CRUK Beatson Institute as a Wellcome Trust Intermediate Clinical Fellow and Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at University of Glasgow. Shortly after he gained his medical degree from Oxford in 2002 he discovered a passion for Hepatology working in the Edinburgh renal and liver transplant unit. He gained a PhD studying liver regeneration in the QMRI with Professors Stuart Forbes and John Iredale investigating stem cell mediated liver regeneration in 2011 and has gone onto publish a series of high impact papers on the role of regenerative cells in the liver how they can be manipulated therapeutically. His clinical work is in transplant hepatology and his research focuses on improving early detection of Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) and developing treatments for its prevention. Combining his group’s expertise in senescence and murine models of HCC targeting mutations he now studies the expansion of HCC from single cells through to metastasis in models relevant to human HCC subtypes. In addition to his preclinical research he is also collaborating with Edinburgh based research groups to study how clinical surveillance for HCC can be improved by the application of Bayesian statistics to detect subtle changes in serum biomarkers for individual patients.